Consent - more than a yes
“Make sure you get consent!”, we tell our young men as they embark on their sexual journey, making the transition to manhood - Consent for what? Do we ever specify? Or is that left to their interpretation?
Consent is so much more than the response to a question - it is an expression of vulnerability- it requires trust. It requires the knowledge that you can say no free of consequence. And it requires the responsible wielding of power. Whoever holds more power in the dynamic has a responsibility to acknowledge it as so, AND demonstrate that they will not use this power maliciously. Consent requires constant communication - you cannot make a decision if you are not properly informed. Consent is also not binary - like many things in life, it is fluid - the level of comfort and trust you have with another person can easily change from one moment to the next.
The violation of that trust is a traumatizing experience - and victims are met with stringent guidelines for sharing their story. The sad truth is, so often there really isn’t a lot of evidence available to back up a victim’s claim. When we believe survivors, we are exercising our faith in a fellow human. We are breaking from from the societal norm which demands proof, hard evidence, be laid at our feet. It is its own form of resistance to patriarchy, to set aside our doubts in the victim, doubts which have been sown into our mind since childhood. We constantly question the validity of a marginalized person’s truth; whether its a crime against our body, our people, our land - colonization is its own violation of consent, the most comprehensive one to date.
For better or worse, acting on our own comes with a cost. Most people don’t want to sit with the uncomfortable truths.
Watching people go about their lives during a genocide, simply choosing not to engage in spite of the many access points of knowledge and action has been glaring proof of this.
The simplification of consent to a mere yes or no ignores the complexities and nuances of social interaction. In Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, Katherine Angel writes,
“ The rhetoric of consent too often implies that desire is something the lies in wait, fully formed within us, ready to extract. Yet our desires emerge in interaction; we don’t always know what we want; sometimes we discover things we didn’t know we wanted; sometimes we discover what we want only in doing. This - that we don’t always know and can’t always say what we want - must be folded into the ethics of sex rather than swept aside as an inconvenience.”
For too many people, it seems that one ‘yes’ is all the license needed to indulge in their fantasies… After all, she said yes. But that can’t be how this works, because that is not how people work! So we have to not only remind people that consent requires constant communication, we also have to demonstrate what it looks like and give folks a chance to practice checking in, with others AND themselves.
When is the last time you checked in with yourself? What did you find? How did you react?
